GE’s legacy on the Hudson

Our opinion: We need to learn from General Electric’s record on PCBs in the Hudson River in order to not repeat the mistakes now and in the future.

More than four decades after PCBs started becoming a serious concern for the Hudson River, General Electric says it still doesn’t know how much of the toxic waste went into the river from its Hudson Falls and Fort Edward plants. It continues to challenge prevailing scientific opinion that PCBs are harmful to humans.

This isn’t just about GE’s history on the Hudson, but about the present and the future. It’s about damage to the river, from the Capital Region to the Atlantic Ocean, that may take years to understand. It’s about policy decisions that are being made, right now, by New York state to cut back on environmental protection. It’s about the need for the public to be wary of how companies with much to gain, or lose, try to shape public opinion at the expense of the public’s interest.

As Times Union investigations editor Brendan Lyons found through months of reporting, GE was advised by an engineer in 1970 that as much as 500,000 pounds of PCBs may have been escaping its capacitor plants every year. He based that on how much fluid the company used, how much it sent back to the supplier, how much went to dumps, and what was left over. Weeks later, a plant manager, with no explanation for how he came up with the figure, put the figure at 50,000 pounds a year.

To this day, GE says it doesn’t know if either number is valid. Yet clearly, the lower number has been more favorable for a company that’s been ordered to do a cleanup now expected to cost around $1 billion. What would 10 times that pollution cost?

Documents also show that, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was considering a cleanup order in the early 1990s, GE developed a campaign to shape public opinion — downplaying the PCB risks, casting the issue as one of personal freedom against big government, enlisting political allies. For many years, it helped delay a decision, as communities and their leaders bought GE’s line that the river was cleaning itself. Today, many of those communities are suing GE for the damage they once dismissed.

If there’s an enduring lesson here, it’s that as much as we may appreciate the jobs, corporate giving and other economic benefits that businesses bring, the first obligation of corporations like GE is to themselves and their shareholders. That’s especially a lesson for New York’s leaders right now. As they consider a new budget, they should be asking what years of cuts have done to agencies like the Department of Environmental Conservation. It’s a lesson for DEC, too, as it talks of relying even more on “self-reporting” by potential polluters, rather than vigorous inspections that it is now too short-staffed to do.

There’s a lesson for the public as well, to be wary when big businesses and their political allies talk about getting government off their backs, and turn as vital a common interest as environmental protection into a divisive partisan issue.

GE says this is all in the past. To the contrary, it’s about the here and now, and about the future.

2 Responses

“The first obligation of corporations like GE is to themselves and their shareholders.” People never seem to learn this lesson, even though corporations prove it true every day.

Most likely in 20 years we’ll fighting with bankrupt fracking corporations that have already moved their profits to shareholders, shell companies, and company execs, to clean up our NY water supplies so that it is safe to drink after they polluted it.

The money, gas, and clean water will be gone and we and our children will be left with the bill.